If you were a biology student anywhere in California during the past 20 or so years, you are already familiar with the work of this month’s featured guest. You have seen her work on your desk, in the lab, on school field trips and in the dirt out in the field somewhere. You have also experienced her work weighing down your field bag.

You would already be familiar with Linda Ann Vorobik‘s work because, as a principal illustrator of The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California (1993), her work fills the pages of this detailed taxonomic guide to California plants.

Linda’s career as a botanical artist had its beginning in childhood. Although she was not drawing plants at the time, she spent a lot of time in her mother’s garden and had parents who gave art supplies as birthday gifts and holiday gifts.

A practicing artist from almost Day One, Linda learned from wonderful art teachers in junior high and in high school. Her experiences in college, however, were a different story.

Linda says that when she presented her first plant drawing to her college art teacher, he told her, “That’s not art.” Linda took five art classes while in college, but eventually switched from having a minor in art to a minor in math.

It wasn’t until she saw the botanical illustrations by Jeanne Janish in Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest did Linda think, “I want to learn how to do this.”

Linda showed Janish’s illustrations to the instructor of her systematic botany class and shared her interest in learning how to create illustrations like Janish. A couple weeks later, her instructor proposed that she create illustrations for his lab manual. Many drawings and a few months later, Linda had earned 9 credit hours creating botanical illustrations. After graduation, her instructor paid her $100 to draw four new plates for the glossary of his lab manual. Linda’s career as a professional botanical illustrator had been launched!

Later, Linda had the opportunity to learn from Jeanne Janish in person when Janish was invited to teach at Southern Oregon University. Janish was kind enough to correspond with Linda by mail after her class and provided Linda with feedback about her work.

Today Linda is a visiting scholar at the University Herbarium at UC Berkeley and at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has served as the principal illustrator for botanical works such as The Flora of North America (Grasses), The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California, The Jepson Desert Manual, A Flora of San Nicolas Island, and A Flora of Santa Cruz Island. Linda conducts field research and teaches botany and botanical illustration workshops in California, Oregon and Washington. She also leads a week-long orchid-painting workshop on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Linda’s illustrations appear in a long list of published work. Over the years, she has had the opportunity to learn about many species of plants. Because she is often called upon to draw many plant species for a floristic work, almost all of Linda’s professional botanical illustration work is from herbarium specimens. For this reason, she has developed the ability to transform flat, squished and crunchy plants into three-dimensional illustrations.

Question #1:
When working with flat, dry herbarium specimens, how do you transfer key information about a plant from the herbarium sheet to a botanical plate? How do you add “life” to a dry, crunchy subject?

Linda:

It is interesting to, at the age of 57, look back at my list of accumulated life-skills and know that it includes one as esoteric as being able to pull a 3-D image out of a 2-D herbarium specimen. Not the most marketable skill, but one that is essential for the scientific botanical artist (as compared with those who create floral images from live specimens or photographs). Herbarium sheets are research collections that include collection information and representative parts of a plant needed for that plant’s identification, or in museum language, that specimen’s “determination” (species, subspecies, or varietal taxonomic identity). There are a few tricks to bring botanical illustrations into 3-D, but let me first state that the style necessitates that the drawing is only partly 3-dimensional.

To a botanist, curving twisting shapes of leaves is of interest, but of more importance is the 2-dimensional shape, the margins of the leaf (whether dentate, serrate, crenulate, etc.), and the vestiture or indumentum on the leaves (“hairs”…which only animals have. Vestiture or indumentum refers to hair-like or scale like growths from the leaves). These are best shown when the subject is drawn flat. Fruits and seeds can usually be found in a non-flattened state, as they are for the most part small and preserved well on the herbarium sheet. Larger fruits and seeds are often either photographed or preserved in boxes in a separate collection space in the herbarium.

That leaves flowers, inflorescences (flowering stalks), and the overall plant habit (entire plant for small plants, or enough of the plant to show diagnostic characteristics, such as a branch or part of a branch, for larger plants). Flowers are the most difficult, and as a botanist and a photographer, I have had an advantage over many illustrators in that I am familiar with, if not the plant to be illustrated, at least members of its genus, which most often have a comparable flower form, and so I can make a life-like drawing based on extrapolating from what I have seen and or photographed already.

These drawings, combined with the pressed specimen, give me what I need to draw the inflorescence, as the specimen shows the spacing between the flower stalks (pedicels), their number, and their angle with the stem. It is merely a mental exercise to put it all together (take a Vorobik workshop to learn more!). Once all these parts have been drawn I can similarly draw the habit, showing leaves with more three-dimensionality by either referring to photographs (and on the west coast, CalPhotos, calphotos.berkeley.edu, is an excellent website) or by using artistic contrast (such as darks and lights) to create depth in illustrations.

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Question #2:You are not only a botanical illustrator, but an illustration editor and book designer too. I have a couple of questions about field guides.

a) Is there a universal rule illustrated field guides must adhere to with respect to their layout? Field guides tend to look the same. Are they so similar because of some universal rule or simply because there aren’t too many ways plant parts can be presented?

Linda:
There is a universal rule for illustrations, in that they should show diagnostic characteristics; that is, what features distinguish the organism (in this case plant) from its closest relatives. For the layout or design of the whole book, if it is a field guide, it should be tote-able (to go along with your field water, which should be potable!) Enough with silly levity. Otherwise field guides should be as easy to use as possible, and directed to the appropriate audience. However, utility is often at odds with publication expense (and sometimes with non-science designer artistic sensibilities!). For example, it is most useful to have the illustrations adjacent to the text, but it is usually cheaper to publish all art in one section, with the text occurring in different folios.

b) How does designing a field guide for the general public differ from designing a field guide for a more technical audience? When the intended audience is a mix of both (such as The Flora of Yosemite for which you were the Technical Editor), how do you strike a balance?

Linda:

Photographs versus line drawings. The general public usually relates to photographs better than technical art. Also the organization differs — beginning audiences really like flowers organized by color; to the more advanced this organization doesn’t make any sense and slows down the identification process. Striking a balance always means sacrificing a bit to your opposing audiences, but I think the Flora of Yosemite does a good job in having gorgeous watercolors by Walter Sydoriak, and also very well-written and thorough technical keys and text by Steve Botti. However, I wish this beautiful, but very cumbersome volume, was designed as a smaller field guide rather than published as a very large coffee-table book.

Botany is a discipline heavy with terminology. It is also a boring subject to many people. How do you make botany a more palatable subject for non-botanists when you teach?

Linda:

That is an easy one — just get them to look at the details of plants! Either with field sketching, where you get that sense of place and that sense of the plant’s place, or dive into the world of plant minutia with a dissecting microscope. This is a scope that magnifies 10 to 40 x, and allows you to look at, for example, the glands on leaves (especially tack glands, or the velvety texture of petals (papillose — like fingers, or mammilose — like, well…you guessed it). Leaves become maps…with rivers of veins, primary and secondary, traveling in a world of green. I just showed two young people the back of a leaf through my dissecting scope, and even though they were disinterested at the thought of it, they admitted while looking, “Wow, that is pretty cool!”

Anyone would have their brain switch click off if they were inundated with terminology without context. Given context, examples of what the words mean, and introduction of the new lingo a bit at a time, the curiosity is piqued, and the desire for more usually increases. The trick in teaching is to let the student set the pace for more knowledge, and to avoid drowning them in terminology.

You have enjoyed a busy life as a freelance illustrator and editor. What professional advice do you have for individuals entering the field of botanical illustration or natural science illustration?

Linda:

Keep your day job. OR, if you are impassioned, know that you may be “suffering, if you want to sing the blues”. I was fortunate in that I followed my passion during a time when there were finances that allowed me to do so. My first job after college was supported by a grant (I worked as a technician transcribing rare plant data for The Nature Conservancy). The work was still work, but it allowed me to think about my intellectual love: botany. Later I received a fellowship that supported my graduate work. Granted I still worked half-time during my schooling, and WORKED to get my PhD, but I think it is a tougher world out there now for young people. And although I have been busy, I have never acquired an income that comes close to supporting a comfortable life. I have an interesting life, and am very grateful for it.

Another bit of advice: couple your training as a natural science illustrator with some complementary training, for example, in the sciences (like what I did), or graphic arts. Or, there is always marrying well!

I know what Linda means by “keep your day job.” Freelance scientific illustration often needs financial support. Although I apprenticed under my advertising artist father through my teen years, I didn’t go into art school. I went into wildlife management. Working for the National Forest and Park Services gave me the outdoor adventure I craved. Always drawing in the field, I eventually ‘schooled’ in scientific illustration via workshops at Scottsdale Artists School and Guild of Natural Science Illustrators conferences. I found the happy marriage in my wildlife profession by combining my illustration with gov’t environmental education and interpretation work. That helped me build my reputation, eventually leaving the Feds to start my own business, Life Drawing & Education. Now I contract with those agencies for educational design. I see so many tallented budding nature artists I’m jealous of! Show or loan your art to nature oriented parks or non-porfits. Barter for tickets or meals. Keep in touch with them, they may need your skills for a project sooner or later for pay. At the same time, take copyright workshop or webinar to understand your options. Learn how to promote yourself with your work on a website. People are looking!

Thank you, Zackery. All good advice. Yesterday I posted a newspaper story on Twitter that, unfortunately, relates to this current discussion. It is about a botanical illustrator whose 30-year career with the Adelaide Botanic Garden came to a close last month. See buff.ly/OMENlK

What a perfect example of the point I was trying to make. In the early 1990s I was a “career staff” (they couldn’t lay me off) at UC, Berkeley. I left the job anyway, as it was half time, with no where to go up the ladder, and no stipend increases except for cost of living. What I learned is that instead of laying off employees, all the scientific illustrators at UC were changed to contract positions…they just eliminated the positions! In this economic climate it behooves us to keep all options open, and the more business skills one has, and the more contacts, the better. Thanks to Zackery for his astute and useful comments.

A new school year begins this month. What advice do you have for K-12 teachers looking for a way to make their presentations or activities about plants and plant communities more exciting for their students?

Linda:

Hands-on activity. Using all of the senses. Stimulating reading. Using the Internet, but not as a primary source of activity, but rather as a supplement to experience with living plants/animals/other organisms. I am not a teacher of young people, so I wouldn’t presume to advise them. I just know that in my life I can thank those few good teachers I had for changing me by being impassioned in the subject themselves and by observing me, figuring out what my strengths were as an individual, and by supporting me in those strengths. Rather than give advice, I wish that I could simply pay teachers what they deserve for taking our society’s children through such a formative time in their lives.

Growing a school garden. Lots of great connections there, especially if it’s designed to attract monarch butterflies. You have the geography connection, they can follow the migrations on Journey North, they learn about different species of bugs and milkweeds and nectar plants. There is quality outdoor learning time and the development of an ethic about human responsibility for the care of nature.

Here Here!! what a great idea. And if you can get your hands on a dissecting microscope, kids of all ages love it when I bring it to the farmer’s market, and show them a whole different, beautiful world of plants!

I agree with Linda — use all of the senses! We all learn in different ways, so activities that can be tiered for visual, kinesthetic, auditory, verbal, logical, or intra- and inter-personal learning styles will add to their experience. Every group and child is different; let them guide you as well as you guiding them. If they are doing an individual project, offer choices on ways they may accomplish it.

Let your passion show! Curiosity and enthusiasm ignite the same emotions in others. Look for common ground to make connections. Most elementary age kids love nature and make connections easily; some older kids may require a bit more creativity since their interests are changing.

As a substitute teacher, I’ve noticed that kids get excited when they take ownership of a project. They love it when it’s their turn to water the sprouts in a growing project, or their week to measure new growth. When we do nature drawing projects, they get interested in the odd historical facts about plants we have in Florida – how the Native Americans and pioneers used them, for example. Planting and caring for mini butterfly gardens is popular as well, especially if the class can observe the life cycle.

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